Luna d'Italia offers a comfortable atmosphere and quality Italian food. Chef and owner Daniele Gerbino comes from Sicily originally, but worked as a chef in Italy for more than a decade, including at Michelin three-star restaurants in Florence. Three years ago he traveled to Taiwan to visit his chef brother. In the beginning he was attracted by Taipei's energetic nightlife, but eventually settled down and employed his cooking skills.
Gerbino's Taiwanese wife, Jo Chou (周孟潔) is an interior designer. Her design for this restaurant is a beige-color floor and white brick wall with a vintage feel. The simple and elegant lighting design somehow gives the small house with 30 seats an illusion of plenty of space. Customers may sit closer to each other than in bigger restaurants, yet they won't feel crowded.
The food prepared by Chef Gerbino is a mixture of Italian regions, including Milan, Sicily and Florence cuisine, and of course there are plenty choices of pastas and pizzas. Spinach souffle cake in fresh tomato sauce and octopus with potato are two original starters. The former is a refined blend of spinach, cream and baked high quality mozzarella cheese. The latter has the refreshing taste of octopus, with thin slices of potatoes and herbs. Gerbino is meticulous about the use of herbs, insisting on using fresh organic herbs and not dry bottled ones.
PHOTO: YU SEN-LUN, TAIPEI TIMES
For the main course, I recommend the Milano-style Ossobuco in tomato sauce and the lamb stew. Both contain rich sauces and tender meat. There are 14 choices of pastas and the hand-made gnocchi dishes are must-tries. Gnocchi here is made in a portion of three-quarters potato and a quarter of flour, which makes for a smooth taste. The gnocchi with shrimp and zucchini and gnocchi with gorgonzola cheese are two popular items.
Gerbino also puts much emphasis on his selection of drinks. The high quality Italian red wine Carpineto 1999 is only NT$1500 a bottle. Nero d'Avola is a bottle of Sicilian red wine that is very fruity and has a fragrance of chestnuts, NT$1000 a bottle. As for white wine, Gerbino recommends Gavi 2004, which is NT$1350 a bottle. There are also dessert wine drinks such as grappa, sambuca and limoncello.
The restaurant is just three months old, but has been packed during weekday lunch hours and weekends since it opened.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and